


"The Gang Drinks Two Cases of Monster"

by triplestar



Category: Soul Eater
Genre: College AU, Gen, platonic ot4
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-25
Updated: 2015-08-25
Packaged: 2018-04-17 04:24:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,583
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4652136
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/triplestar/pseuds/triplestar
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which Stein, Spirit, Marie, and Azusa pull an all-nighter.</p>
            </blockquote>





	"The Gang Drinks Two Cases of Monster"

Azusa shows up at Stein and Spirit’s shitty little apartment on the east side of their boring, cramped college town at around 6 pm with two cases of energy drinks and a backpack filled with meticulously written and highlighted notecards.

“That’s a lot of Monster,” Stein notes as he lets her in.

“Probably not enough, in fact,” she assures him, setting the drinks in question down by the wall ( she’d have put them in a more accessible location if she could, but in true first-apartment fashion their counter was overflowing - though in this case the medical textbooks and maybe-real-maybe-fake organs in jars outnumbered the dirty dishes - and they didn’t seem to own a table ).

Before Azusa can ask where they’re meant to study when the only available thing resembling a table is currently in use and housing that something she swear to god just moved ( is that a fucking kidney? ), Stein gestures towards the rug taking up about half the room’s real estate, a mass-produced and likely slightly itchy rendition of the classic ‘I Want to Believe’ poster. She’s tempted to roll her eyes at the sheer TV-brand cardboard-cutout nerd factor of the thing, though it and her have become well acquainted over the last six months of study sessions.

“We could have done this at my place, you know,” she sighs, settling herself in front of the woven UFO with only a momentary judgmental glance thrown its way.

Stein shakes his head. “You’re in the same apartment complex as Blair.”

“Ah.”

“And, you know…” He makes a vague motion towards the ceiling fan, from which hangs a very large and very lacy purple bra.

Azusa stares it down in an exasperated form of disbelief.

“How the hell did that get up there.”

“Search me; do you actually think I was here when it did?”

Azusa groans, rubbing at the bridge of her nose in defiance of the obstacle that the thick rims of her glasses pose. “I don’t know how you put up with him.”

Stein answers her with a shrug. “He’s my best friend, he’s earned some leeway.”

“Well, he looks to be on the track to use that up by within the next few months, unless you’re hiding some quantities of saintly patience in those jars of.... God, Stein, what the fuck are those things anyway?”

“Highly illegal.”

“Of course.”

He grins. She rolls her eyes.

When they were in high school, Stein had been voted ‘Most Likely To End Up A Serial Killer’ by write-in. If her student council position had afforded her the power to do so, she would have amended the title to ‘Most Likely To Bribe The Morgue Workers For Spare Parts.’ She had requested that the yearbook committee do so twice, in fact.

Azusa would claim clairvoyance if Stein wasn’t just so fucking predictable about his morbid interests.

“You brought your notes?” Her attention is diverted by Stein pointing to her overfilled book bag. A smug grin slides across her face.

“Must you even ask?” Pulling the bag towards her, she begins emptying its contents in an impressively orderly fashion, blocking out Stein’s stupid fucking X-Files rug with color-coded binders and painstakingly organized notes.

Stein whistles at the display. “You’re nothing if not thorough.”

“Naturally. You’re prepared as well, I hope?”

He holds up a finger in that universal sign for ‘hold on a second’ and dives into the dingy ‘bedroom’ in the back of the apartment ( being listed as a bedroom on the floor plan was all it had done to earn the title, the mattress on the floor more often used as storage space than as a bed ), resurfacing with a messy stack of papers and an impossibly shabby textbook. Azusa sighs.

“What did you do with the binders I got you?”

“Used them as a surface to snort cocaine off and burned them to destroy the evidence.”’

“There’s no need to be an asshole, Stein.”

He grins. She rolls her eyes. This is the nature of their friendship in its purest form.

 

* * *

 

Without anything to keep order among the notes Stein had accumulated over the last year, whatever semblance of an organization system he might have had fell into chaos very quickly upon someone ( a pair of college students with a long night ahead of them ) attempting to make use of the material. Neat, organized stacks of paper battle for real estate on the rug with a chaotic sea of messy handwriting and faded Xerox.

It would take several years and two librarians to get Stein’s notes back in their intended order, Azusa thinks, and she doesn’t have either.

The door swings open, the gust from it reducing Azusa’s futile efforts at making sense of the mess to ashes. Azusa curses, loud and irate.

“Spirit, for once in your goddamn life, could you try not fucking up?”’

The redheaded man currently attempting to slide off a pair of sneakers without using his hands raises his hands in a gesture that Azusa interprets as surrender, and Stein correctly identifies as mild fear.

“Sorry, sorry! At least I showed up this time, right?”

“You showed up half an hour late to a study session being held at your own apartment.”

The awkward smile on Spirit’s face is sheepish enough for a whole flock.

“Yeah, I know, I know. But I have an excuse, okay? You told me to get Marie and food, and that took a while!”

Azusa blinks. “So where is she then?”

“About that,” His hand moves to rub the back of his neck, faltering and falling at Azusa’s steely gaze. “She. Um. Won’t be joining us for now.”

“And why is that?” Some glares shot daggers. Azusa’s fired a precision laser directly into the ‘primal terror’ center of Spirit’s brain.

A bead of sweat makes its way from Spirit’s brow down past his chin, falling on the floor with a deafening crash. In Spirit’s mind, the scene is filmed with incredible focus, dynamic camera angles and an ominous track to reflect visually and audibly how fucked he is.

“I may have forgotten to pick her up.”

There’s a moment of absolute silence, and then, in perfectly timed expressions of shock, Stein bursts out laughing, and the pencil in Azusa’s hand snaps in half.

“Spirit, you absolute fucking -”

“Hey, hey, it’s not like I forgot completely! I was just so late that she gave up on waiting for me and decided to walk her herself, that’s different.”

Azusa is well-read to a frightening extreme. Her vocabulary is the largest among her peers, and yet she cannot find a single word to express how badly she, in this moment, wishes that Spirit Albarn would suffer a great and nondescript misfortune.

“Oh my god -” She whips off her glasses to rub the bridge of her nose at such a rate that the friction might light her precious classwork on fire. “She has absolutely no sense of direction, Spirit! By the time she gets here, she’ll be too exhausted to get anything done. If she fails her exam, it’s on your head.”

Behind her, Stein slowly drags a finger across his throat with a grin. Spirit nonverbally tells Stein to go fuck himself.

 

* * *

  

Marie joins them three hours and two arguments later, greeted by a storm of apologies on Spirit’s behalf. True to character, she assures them that it’s fine, it was no big deal, what’s a few hours of walking anyway, and oh, you’ll never guess what happened to me on the way there! While her arrival may have heralded the temporary quelling of Azusa’s wrath, it brought a swift end to their productivity as well.

A lot can happen in three hours, and Marie ensures that they understand this in great detail.

“Really? I thought BJ switched schools,” Azusa remarks forty minutes into Marie’s story.

Marie shakes her head emphatically. “No, no, he did, he just hasn’t moved yet. It’s such a shame to see him go, he was always so nice to have around. Sometimes I regret breaking up with him, you know?”

Azusa bristles.

“If you wanna hit it again, now’s your last chance,” Spirit remarks around a mouthful of stale chips. In his particular worldview, that of a nineteen year old who prioritized sex over tact, this was good advice. In the eyes of his lady friends and colleagues, those who had by now ceased to view this kind of comment as endearing, it was, in layman’s terms, fucking rude.

At some point, Azusa’s pointed glares and Stein’s quiet laughter had become the background radiation of Spirit’s life.

Between audible judgment from two parties, laughter bubbles up from Marie’s throat.

“Not all of us are as casual about that kind of thing as you are.”

Spirit shrugs. “It comes with experience. ...Sexperience, if you will.”

Azusa leans toward Stein to murmur her discontent as Marie and Spirit’s back-and-forth slowly devolves into jokes of poor taste. “Why don’t you own any couch pillows for me to throw at him?”

“We’re pretty broke.”

“Not so broke that you can’t buy human kidneys.”

“Would you believe me if I said they were a gift?”

“No.”

“I thought not.”

Across the sea of scattered papers, Spirit pales. “Wait - Stein, are those things real?”

“You think I’d waste my time with fakes?”

“Oh my God.” With a hand held over his mouth, Spirit makes a rapid beeline for the bathroom door, sending papers flying in all directions as he exits stage left. As the color-coded dust settles, Marie and Stein look to Azusa in anticipation of an outburst. Instead, she gives a resigned groan.

“We’re not going to get anything fucking done around here anyway.”

 

* * *

 

Marie holds Spirit’s hair back as he vomits into a freshly scrubbed toilet and reassures him that keeping human organs in jars is probably normal for med students. Spirit throws up on her shoes five minutes after telling her that he’s done. This is the nature of their friendship in its purest form.

 

* * *

 

No one is certain whose idea it was to order pizza, but at eleven that night pizza comes to them anyway, carried to their doorstep on the arms of angels.

“I don’t think Justin is exactly an angel,” Marie points out between slices. “Didn’t he get expelled a few weeks ago?”

“He delivered our pizza; that makes him heaven-sent,” Spirit insists.

None of them knew Justin Law beyond his status as a boy genius and the black eye he’d given some pissy art student, and all things considered, this was for the best.

“Besides,” continues Spirit as he reaches for the last breadstick, “all geniuses are assholes, it’s part of the whole deal. Look at Stein.”

Stein raises an eyebrow over the rims of his glasses. “Thanks.”

A harsh blow to the back of the head rattles Spirit’s brain and throws his train of thought off the tracks. For someone who claimed to not have much interest in fighting, Marie hits fucking hard.

“Stop being a jackass, Spirit; Stein’s not that bad. You, on the other hand-”

Stein cuts Marie off before any slights can be made on his roommate’s questionable character. “I think we’re already aware of Spirit’s flaws as a person. No need to state the obvious.”

“Thank you, Stein.” Forcing so much sarcasm into three syllables is difficult, but Spirit manages.

“You’re welcome.”

As roommates, it is their lot in life to push each other’s buttons endlessly, but as Stein has no apparent buttons for Spirit to push, he’s at a disadvantage. Grumbling something inaudible, Spirit gets up to throw away the empty boxes, flipping his roommate off as he goes. The gesture is met with a blithe smile.

“I don’t know what you see in him,” Azusa remarks dryly, throwing a disdainful gaze towards the bra still hanging from the ceiling fan.

Stein laughs. “Don’t even joke about that.”

 

* * *

 

Azusa snaps sometimes around one in the morning.

“What the fuck have we been doing all night,” she hisses, furiously shuffling and re-sorting her painstakingly prepared notecards. “We can’t afford to waste this whole night watching fucking Seinfeld reruns, we’ve got exams to prepare for; God, where the fuck are my textbooks?”

Though a moment is taken to mourn the end of their social hour, the others don’t protest, immediately falling in line and assisting Azusa in her feverish quest for their study materials. The cases of Monster are dragged out and cracked open, Spirit proposing a toast as Azusa hands out their lifeblood for the next six hours.

“Just one toast,” he pleads. “We deserve it.”

She sighs. “Fine.” The way that Spirit fist-pumps when she gives her approval earns him a truly impressive eyeroll.

“To good grades,” they say as they bump their cans together with hopes of a productive session.

“To maybe passing this thing,” they say as they raise their third round a few hours later.

“To not fucking dying,” Spirit says to himself as he opens the second case a short millennium after.

The sun is beginning to peek through the grimy curtains of the apartment, a fact which would typically cause one to reconsider their current state of consciousness, and perhaps make for the nearest bedroom. Upon noticing the sunrise coming in through the windows, Azusa groans and takes another long sip of Monster.

“We’ll survive this,” She mutters to no one in particular.

Stein points to the couch, and more specifically, to the figure passed out on top of it. “Marie didn’t.”

“God fucking-” Should taking off her glasses to rub her eyes be this much of a challenge? Azusa doubts it. “Spirit, weren’t you supposed to make sure she stayed awake?”

The accused sets down the textbook he’d been holding mere inches from his face to squint at Azusa. “I don’t… think so? Hey, if she’s already asleep, do you mind if I follow her lead? I don’t think these drinks are working.”

“Absolutely not, we-”

“Just let him go to bed if he wants to.” Ignoring Spirit clinging to his arm, showering him with thank-yous and promises of eternal gratitude, Stein addresses Azusa in a blunt tone. “We can just wake him up in a few hours.”

She sighs. “Fine.” After punching the air in celebration, Spirit thanks a god he doesn’t believe in and heads for the bedroom.

The other two watch unsympathetically as he runs into the doorframe.

“Do you think I should help him?” Stein asks.

Azusa shakes her head. “Definitely not.”

 

* * *

  

“How the hell did you manage this?” Azusa asks in disbelief, staring at Marie’s grades like she’s trying to will the ink marks into a more believable shape. “You barely studied!”

Marie sips her coffee with an innocent smile. “It’s not really that impressive - Spirit did fairly well too, I heard.”

The disdain is evident in Azusa’s scowl. “Spirit-” She spits his name out like foul fruit. “-is fairly well known for cheating.”

“Not academically, though.” Setting aside her drink, Marie gently tugs the papers out of Azusa’s hands, stowing them away in her backpack. She’s been told that she smiles like the sun before, by both flirtatious men and equally flirtatious women, and now she makes good use of that small beauty as she looks back at her friend, hoping that her grin is radiant. “How about this - I’ll tell you how I got those grades if you take me out for coffee again next weekend.”

Azusa blinks, and then smiles ever so slightly. “I can agree to that.”

 

**Author's Note:**

> "why is there no college au material for the soul eater adults" - me, a week ago, prior to producing this content myself. also these guys are my platonic ot4 and there's like nothing about them so i had to go and fix that. 
> 
> this is pretty much completely unedited from the first draft lmfao


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